"What happened next, Tita?" Nigel finally asked, his voice breaking the silence that had settled over us the moment Tita Kim stopped speaking so abruptly.
On the screen, she shifted slightly in her seat. I noticed that she had changed clothes again. This time she was dressed in something meant for going out. It was neat and presentable, the sort of outfit someone would wear for errands or a casual visit outside, but clearly not the clothes she had been wearing earlier while doing chores around the house.
The small change made Valerie and I exchange a quick glance.
Something about it felt threatening.
We both had the same thought at the same time. What if she was about to end the interview?
Of course, it was never really our place to decide when the conversation would stop. The whole thing existed only because Tita Kim allowed it. Still, after listening for hours and slowly piecing together fragments of her story, the idea that it might end before we heard everything made my chest tighten with quiet worry.
We had come too far just to leave the story unfinished.
For a moment, Tita Kim said nothing. Then she resumed speaking, her voice calm, almost distant, as if she had stepped back into a memory that lived far away from us.
"My old friend, Edward, exchanged vows with Françoise in a grand wedding," she said. "Their union was reported quite intensively around the world. Because of all that exposure, people began calling him many things. Most of them were not kind. Some were simply meant to be funny."
I shifted slightly in my chair.
Our group had gathered around the dining table, the laptop sitting at the center like a small stage where Tita Kim appeared through the video call. From where I sat at the side, I could see everyone leaning closer than usual, their eyes fixed on the screen.
It felt strange.
Normally, whenever we met up like this, things were loud and messy. The boys usually drifted off somewhere else in the house, their heads bent over a mobile game while arguing loudly about points and rankings. The girls, meanwhile, would scroll endlessly on their phones, half listening to whatever conversation happened around them.
Very little ever got done.
But tonight was different.
Here we were, all of us seated around the dining table like students during a lecture, listening with unusual focus to what was beginning to feel like the climax of the long story Tita Kim had been telling us.
"At the wedding reception," she continued, "it ended up being just me and Jaime from our side. So naturally, we became each other's partner for Ed's wedding."
She paused briefly, as if remembering the detail with mild amusement.
"It also helped that Jaime had recently separated from his girlfriend. It was a mutual break up."
Tita Kim then resumed her recollection of the reception itself.
Apparently, it was there that she formally met Françoise for the first time. As she described it to us, she finally understood why her friend Edward had done something as drastic as throwing his scholarship aside just to help and marry a stranger.
Françoise, according to her, was a natural beauty.
She had a round face and soft features that gave her an unmistakably feminine appearance. Yet the structure of her face suggested something else as well. Tita Kim explained that it was the kind of face that would age gracefully, the sort that matured with time instead of fading from it.
Aside from Edward's wife, Tita Kim had also been introduced to another man.
She told us that she had to address him by his first name rather than by "Mr. Lorraine." That title, she explained, belonged exclusively to his father.
What followed was a brief stretch of trivia about how certain social customs worked in Europe before I was even born, particularly among people who belonged to high society.
While she spoke, I listened quietly, though I could not help the strange feeling forming in my mind.
Everything she was describing sounded almost unreal.
Not that I believed she was making it up. I knew she would not do that. Tita Kim had never been the type to invent stories for attention.
Still, hearing about formal receptions, inherited titles, and people who lived in a world so different from ours made it all feel strangely distant. Like something that belonged inside a novel rather than a real memory.
Then, finally, she told us something that sounded almost normal.
Compared to the whirlwind of unusual events she had described over the past few hours, this part felt grounded in reality.
Around October of 1997, she said, she had attended one of the biggest research conferences of the year as a student researcher representing Heidelberg.
As she talked about it, her voice softened slightly.
She told us that the experience had been incredibly humbling.
At that time, she admitted, she had believed she was better than most people around her. She had been confident in her own skills and knowledge. Perhaps too confident.
But the studies presented at that conference had forced her to reconsider everything she thought she knew.
"The things I read there," she said slowly, "opened my eyes to entirely new horizons."
She let out a small breath, as if even now the memory carried a faint sense of exhaustion.
"It was both mind blowing and a headache," she continued. "I could have never thought of those concepts in my entire life. Those were the works of geniuses. Every single one of them."
Tita Kim kept describing the feeling, the overwhelming rush of ideas and discoveries that had surrounded her during those days at the conference. She spoke with such vivid detail that it almost felt like we had been transported there with her.
For a moment, I completely forgot about the shocking revelation she had told us earlier.
Then she said something that snapped my attention back instantly.
"And then," she said quietly, "I met this woman."
My head turned sharply toward the laptop.
I narrowed my gaze at the screen, not because I was judging her, but because a sudden curiosity had taken hold of me.
At the same time, a faint sense of suspicion crept into my mind.
I had no idea why.
But something about the way she said it made me feel that whoever this woman was, she had played an important role in what came next. And before Tita Kim even began the reminiscence, I found myself wondering what kind of relationship the two of them might have had.